The Lord sent over a nice archive of the early SUNN O))) European and UK touring days. Julian Cope there in the camo and also at the Hammersmith show in orange and fur cape there. Thank you all for the support over the years!

*** VINCENT DE ROGUIN (the man known at the time of these tours as MONSTER) supplement added 18th Nov 2012. Merci.

Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a popular belief that a cataclysm will take place Dec 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 is simply the day that the calendar will go to the next b'ak'tun, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The date which the calendar will go to the next piktun (a complete series of 20 b'ak'tuns), at Long Count 1.0.0.0.0.0, will be Oct 13, 4772. Sandra Noble, exec director Mesoamerican research organization Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.(FAMSI), notes "for the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle". She considers portrayal of Dec 2012 asdoomsday or cosmic-shift event to be "a complete fabrication, chance for a lot of people to cash in."

(As quoted in USA Today (MacDonald 2007). Despite this knowledge questions still remain, as Professor Robert Chalken states "The ancient Maya really saw a lot of value in the calendar and treated it as a sacred thing, for them it was an ongoing process they would finish a cycle, celebrate, and then return to working on it. The question still remains why they stop with no sign of starting up again It would have made much more sense to stop at the next cycle if they had just gotten 'sick' of working on it.")

Third part of the ongoing co-curation at Cafe Oto in London was announced this week. PErformances by Iancu Dumitrescu, Ana-Maria Avram and Mats Lindström. I will be performing with Avram/Dumitrescu's ensemble as well. This series has been an interesting display of detailed nuance and conceptual music... this edition will reinforce that. Thanks to John & Hamish for inviting me to do this, truly enjoyable. We will announce #4 (April 2013) in the upcoming weeks... will also see my musical involvement.

The third event in our ongoing series co-curated by SUNN O)))'s Stephen O'Malley features maverick electro-acoustic composer Mats Lindström and new works by Romanian spectralist composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram performed by The Hyperion Ensemble featuring the composers alongside Tim Hodgkinson, Chris Cutler and Stephen O'Malley.

IANCU DUMITRESCU

Iancu Dumitrescu is considered one of the leaders of the spectral music trend at a worldwide level. In 1976 he founded the HYPERION Ensemble, proposing a new aesthetic in today’s music, hyper-spectral, based on the radiant power of sound, within its microcosmic complexity - which is questioned, analyzed, re-composed ​​from a spectral perspective.

He centers his work on the phenomenological principle, which Sergiu Celibidache made him to discover, and which Dumitrescu applies to the composition itself, and on the idea of acousmatics. Acousmatics represents for Dumitrescu not only « the art of disguising a sonic source » in a concrete approach, but the very metaphor of the sound, infinite, cryptical alchemy applied to the sound material.

Iancu Dumitrescu has born the 15th of July 1944 in Sibiu, Romania, son of a University Professor and Mathematics teacher. He studied at the Musical Academy in Bucharest and followed that with systematic studies of conducting and musical phenomenology with Sergiu Celibidache. From 1966, for two decades he launches into a fervent musicological and journalistic activity working under incredibly difficult political conditions and cultural repression. At the same time he was working as a composer and his early discoveries of the sound core, the natural harmonics, the microscopic approach of the sound world etc. The idea of ​​acousmatic. The Spectralism - have remained central in his composition since.

In the mid-seventies Dumitrescu started the Hyperion Ensemble, a fluid, artistic group of performers and composers who will occupy for 40 years, one of the most important and dynamic role in Romanian music.

After extensive explorations, he finally foresees his own vision on sonic world he has pursued since. Thus, the essential concepts of "phenomenological reduction" and "pure intuition" became functional in composition. According to Dumitrescu, it is the first time phenomenology is utilized as a true method of composition, which re-poses in question essential concepts, nevertheless hidden at that time: inspiration, vision, creativity, imagination.

In 1991 Dumitrescu inaugurated the EDITION MODERN CD Label in collaboration with Chris Cutler's "RER Megacorp". The label has released more than 20 CDs with the music of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria AVRAM.

Dumitrescu is also Founder and Artistic Director of the International Music Festivals of Computer Assisted Music Acousmania, Musica Nova, Musica Viva and the International Spectral Music Festival SPECTRUM XXI - held annually in three European capitals.

He has created more than 200 works, chamber music, electro acoustic, orchestral music, computer music, etc.

Ana-Maria Avram is a composer, pianist, conductor, born in 1961 in Bucharest, Romania. She studied composition at the National University of Music- Bucharest and musical aesthetics at Sorbonne, Paris. She has been a member of the Hyperion Ensemble since 1988. Her music is affiliated with the spectral music trend and incorporates the outward semblences of abstraction of archetypal sound, achieving its full development in the synthesis of electroacoustic and instrumental sources. She composed since now around 130 works, music for soloists, chamber music, music for orchestra, electronic music and computer assisted music including commissions from the Kronos Quartet (San Francisco) Ç 20 Jahrhundert È from Vienna, soloists from l’Orchestre National de France, orchestras as Bucharest Philharmonic Orchestra, Romanian National Orchestra, Romanian Radio Chamber Orchestra and L’Orchestre de Chambre de Roumanie amongst many others.

Mats Lindström works as a composer and a musician, often with strains of live-electronics. He often works with intermedia, scenic elements and visual arts as a complement to the music, and has worked both with music for concerts, theatre and dance as well as radio-art and sound installations. Formerly an engineer in the electronics industry Lindström has designed and constructed a number of unique electronic musical instruments and apparatuses. His LP 'МИГ' - including recordings from the Aviation Engines Museum in St Petersburg and pieces recorded for theatre and at Stockholm's EMS Elektronmusikstudion was released on Ideologic Organ in 2012.

TIM HODGKINSON

Born in 1949, graduate in social anthropology at Cambridge, co-founder of the politically and musically radical group Henry Cow in 1968, Tim Hodgkinson has followed a restless and critical creative path. His compositions have been interpreted in such international festivals as: Spectrum XXI (Brussels, Paris, Geneva, London), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (U.K.) where he was a featured composer in 2007, Craiova and Ploiesti Festivals (Romania), Guarda Festival (Portugal), Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte di Montepulciano (Italy), Konfrontationen Festival (Austria), Nordlyd Festival (Norway), Musique Action (France) and the European Symposium of Experimental Music at Barcelona. As an improvising musician on reeds and lap steel guitar Tim Hodgkinson has worked all over the world with many of the most acclaimed artists in the field and continues to be fully engaged in the celebrated Konk Pack trio with Roger Turner and Thomas Lehn.

Cutler started messing about with banjo, guitar and trumpet at school, settling for drums and playing shadows and other instrumental covers in his first band in 1963.

Subsequently he played in R'n'B and Soul Bands, winding up in 1967 playing in London's psychedelic clubs. At the start of the seventies, with Dave Stewart, he co-founded The Ottawa Music Co, a 22 piece Rock composer's orchestra, eventually joining British experimental group Henry Cow with whom he toured, recorded and worked in dance and theatre projects until it's demise in 1978.

In 1977 Henry Cow, The Mike Westbrook Orchestra and Frankie Armstrong formed a big-band and toured around Europe. After Henry Cow, Cutler went on to co-found a series of mixed national groups Art Bears, News from Babel, Cassiber, The (ec) Nudes, P53 and The Science Group. He was a permanent member of American bands Pere Ubu, Hail and The Wooden Birds and now works sporadically with John Rose, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Iancu Dumitrescu, Peter Blegvad and Stevan Tickmayer.

Other lasting collaborations have included Aqsak Maboul (Belgium), Lussier/Derome and Les Quatre Guitaristes (Canada), The Kalahari Surfers (Africa), Perfect Trouble (Germany), Between (Sweden), N.O.R.M.A., (Italy), Telectu (Portugal), Mieko Shimizu (Japan),The Hyperion Ensemble (Romania), The Film Music Orchestra, 'Oh Moscow', Gong, The Work and Towering Inferno (UK), The Residents (USA), and stateless Tense Serenity and Mirror Man. There have also been countless improvisational groupings and solo performances. Recent projects include Radio pieces with Lutz Glandien and Shelly Hirsch, Live Soundtrack for Carl Dreher's Vampyr (with Italians Musci and Venosta), his Timescales project and work with David Thomas and Linda Thompson.

He also founded and runs the independent label and distribution service ReR/Recommended and, until 1991, the East European specialist label Points East. He is editor of the New Music magazine Unfiled and author of the theoretical book File Under Popular as well as of numerous articles and papers published in 14 languages. He lectures intermittently on theoretical and music related topics. He has appeared on more than 100 recordings.

O'Malley also worked with the French choreographer and theatre director Gisèle Vienne, American sculptor Banks Violette, the Italian performance artist Nico Vascellari and the Belgian film maker Alexis Destoop. He also curates the Ideologic Organ label.

The absolute deep electric-rain-forest sound atmosphere that the listener will hear on this record is the tip of the iceberg of a same rich and elaborate work process. For over 30 years, Norbert Möslang is making the world sound. He does not use things as instruments, but rather captures their vibrations. He immerses himself in the hidden world of vibrations and convert them into loud sounds and thick textures.

Möslang’s music achoes clearly Brian Eno’s words when he says : « the idea of music as a highly physical, sensual entity – music free of narrative and literary structures, free to be pure sonic experience. And the idea of music as a highly intellectual, spiritual experience».

Nonetheless, the “Everyday Cracked-Electronics” are a kind of poetry, a celebration of banality in all of its greatness. Voice Crack can thus be compared to another Swiss duo, the artists Peter Fischl and David Weiss. In their movie “The Way the Things Go”, also made in the mid ‘80s, a chain reaction using every day objects activates a huge fresco of absurdity. The film was shot without a microphone and a Foley artist added the soundtrack in post-production. As such, the sound for this movie was also made with everyday appliances. In the mid ‘80s, without knowing each other, both Voice Crack and Fischli/Weiss turned banality into the marvelous.

Instead of having a historically unified style in art and music movements, Switzerland generated very idiosyncratic bands and individualized figures. Think of Celtic Frost, The Young Gods, Samael, Günter Müller, Grauzone, Yello, Lilliput, Christian Marclay or Braintickets, among others. Voice Crack certainly have a place on this dream list! In this context, I attempted to a Voice Crack gig when I was 21 in a city of 35000; in the Middle Ages bulwark of the city of Fribourg existed the annual experimental arts festival. The concert was a path-clearing musical experience. Möslang and Voice Crack opened to me both the ways to experimental noise music as well as sound art performance.

These doors never closed and allowed to drift again and again into a continually larger and deeper endlessness; worlds of sounds and noises.

But the Swissness stops here.

Voice Crack and Möslang belong to a international underground current. When looking through the rear-view mirror it’s clear that in late 70s and early 80s there weren’t many artists working with harsh noise, a list which now read as “classics” : The New Blockaders, Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle in UK; Hijokaidan, Merzbow, Incapacitants in Japan; NON, The Haters in the states, among only few others.

Since the break up of Voice Crack in 2002, Norbert Möslang enlarged his practice to cover all noise and experimental practices, from lo-fi “Everyday-Cracked-Electronics”, saturation/overdrive work, performance and improvisation, field recordings and multi layered ambient-noise composition.

Through interconnecting heterogeneous everyday objects; linking the outside sound environment into a quiet art museum by fixing microphones to its windows; filming the underwater Venice’s canal in order to set off never ending imagery flux; allowing a movie to play its own sound track by triggering photo-sensors; Möslang proves to our entire nervous system that the world we inhabit is no more than infinite continuum.

To talk about “indoor_outdoor” specifically, again Möslang music drives us from nothing to everything. A field recording in the water of a swiss harbour close from his house is then processed and composed these files in a studio. The second track “hot_cold_shield” is a collaborative duo with Toshimaru Nakamura, the influential member of the Onkyokei scene in Japan, a brutal live improvisation recorded at “Manif d’art” in Québec this year.

Pleased to announce the release of a second beautiful duo album by Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang "The face of the earth". The album will be released on LP and digital format on December 10th. You can preorder it here:

All tracks composed by Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang.Tavaf composed by JK based on a ghazal by Attar (12th c.).

Tavaf and Ordered pairs II recorded by Randall Dunn at ADA studios, Istanbul July 2012.Ordered pairs I, Mirror stage and The face of the earth recorded by Mell Dettmer at Studio Soli, Seattle June 2012 & St. Bartholomeo’s, Bologna.Kidung and Mirror stage recorded by Mell Dettmer at Dympna’s, Seattle 2012.

The second beautiful album by the duo of Jessika Kenney — a vocalist known for her haunting timbral sense, as well as her profound interpretation of Persian vocal traditions, and Eyvind Kang — a violist for whom the act of music and learning is a spiritual discipline.

""Work of delicate beauty, as pristine as the surface of a lake at dawn on a summer's morning." —TheQuietus

The compositions on this album are about drawing the binary from the unary, like reflections from a mirror, and its inverse, the concealed unity. Listener/reader, translation/composition, memory/imagination- reflecting each other, they open up a current which flows in a sudden oscillation.

Here we have followed a geological image; in the expression of the face of the earth (from Pr. "rokh-e khåk"), a new spectrum of binaries is revealed. In the Classical Persian traditions, this can be found in the dynamic multiplicity exemplified by the term 'radif', used in both poetry and music, as both poeme and matheme.

We would invite the listener as reader, by making our "reading cards" in the insert, to become a participant in the creation of meaning, including translation processes which seek corresponding musical atmospheres, for example:

The Central Javanese Wangsalan is a kind of riddle(two lines, 12 syllables each, divided 4 and 8), sung by the female vocalist in the gamelan, often using images of natural phenomena alongside descriptions of human characteristics, invoking atmospheres of primordial knowledge, humor, heightened sensation, philosophy, with much hidden wordplay and reference.